Alan Reece

Alan Reece, who has died aged 85, became a successful entrepreneur after a
long academic career and was one of the north of England’s most prominent
philanthropists, with a special interest in engineering education.

Reece lectured in Agricultural Engineering at Newcastle University for 28 years before turning his hand to creating a business group which eventually generated annual sales of more than £200 million.

His change of direction began in 1983, when a consultancy project for an American contractor brought him the opportunity to apply principles of soil mechanics to a critical problem afflicting undersea pipelines and telecoms cables: damage from trawler dragnets meant that they were being uprooted as fast as they could be laid.

Reece designed a highly efficient undersea plough which slashed the costs of installing cables below the seabed. In a new era of global telecommunication, this was a hugely important contribution to the reliability of international networks.

His initial aim was to commercialise the invention while continuing his academic career; but when that proved impossible he resigned his readership in 1984, aged 57, to launch Soil Machine Dynamics. Based at Wallsend, the company grew rapidly to become a world leader in subsea vehicles.

A man of great joie de vivre as well as engineering brilliance, Reece surrounded himself with talented colleagues and insisted that business should be fun. He went on to acquire a second company, Pearson Engineering at Gateshead, which focused on the design and development of equipment to protect armoured vehicles against mines and improvised explosive devices.

Pearson became one of the north-east’s most celebrated business successes of recent years, winning a 2012 Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the innovation category. Its Spark roller devices, attached to the front of wheeled and tracked military vehicles, have saved hundreds of British soldiers and US Marines from death and injury in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The son of a soldier, Alan Richard Reece was born in London on March 7 1927 and educated at Harrow County School. He went on to study Mechanical Engineering at King’s College, an outpost of Durham University which became the independent Newcastle University in 1963. After industrial experience in the Vickers Armstrong armaments factory on Tyneside and Ford’s tractor plant at Dagenham, Reece rejoined the university to lecture in Agricultural Engineering.

The financial success of his business ventures enabled Reece to establish his own charitable foundation, with the principal objective of supporting engineering and technical education. Donations ranged from £5 million for the Institute of Manufacturing at Cambridge University — which named a research building in his honour — to £250,000 for the creation of Reece Scholarships to help young people in the Newcastle area pursue careers in engineering.

Last year the foundation also gave £500,000 to the parish council of his home village of Wylam in Northumberland to sustain its sub post-office as a community venture after it was raided by armed robbers.

Reece was highly critical of successive governments for their failure to encourage manufacturing industry and what he saw as a related collapse in the teaching of maths and science — the result of “an extraordinary political consensus that actively discourages making, growing and mining”. He published a campaigning pamphlet, Reviving British Manufacturing, in 2011.

Despite a heart weakness caused by childhood rheumatic fever, Reece was an accomplished skier and mountaineer and an enthusiastic “Munro bagger” who came within a dozen or so of reaching the summits of all 282 Scottish peaks; in later years he was an avid mountain-biker.

He also continued to take an active interest in industrial design, addressing such challenges as the boat guidance structure beneath Gateshead’s Millennium Bridge.

Alan Reece married, in 1949, Doreen Harrison; they separated in 1972. He is survived by three children of the marriage, and by his long-time partner Margaret Fulton.